In the past, optical interfaces were designed from discrete components. There have been many efforts to establish industrial standards in optical modules resulting in the formation of several Multi Source Agreements (MSA) including the 300 Pin MSA. This MSA specification consolidated this functionality into a 300 pin transponder. See, Reference Documents for 300 Pin 10 Gb and 40 Gb Transponders, available at www.300pinmsa.org, incorporated herein by reference. The industry has spent the last several years designing host circuit packs using MSA-based transponders.
Over the past few years, technological advances have resulted in smaller such devices such as XFP. XFP is currently the most advanced MSA providing compact 10 Gb/s modules at reduced costs with lower power consumption. The XFP device is a hot-pluggable small footprint serial-to-serial data-agnostic multirate optical transponder intended to support telecom (SONET OC-192 and G.709 “OTU-2”) and datacom applications (10 Gb/s Ethernet and 10 Gb/s Fibre Channel). Nominal data rates range from 9.95 Gb/s, 10.31 Gb/s, 10.52 Gb/s, 10.70 Gb/s and the emerging 11.09 Gb/s. The XFP transponder supports all data encodings for these technologies, and may be used to implement single-mode or multi-mode serial optical interfaces at 850 nm, 1310 nm or 1550 nm. The XFP transponder design may use one of several different optical connectors. A full description of the XFP is contained in “XFP (10 Gigabit Small Form Factor Pluggable Module)”, Revision 3.1, Apr. 2, 2003, available at www.xfpmsa.com/cgi-bin/msa.cgi, the entirety of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Currently, the XFP module is incompatible with existing 300 pin MSA transponders, and it is not practical to redesign existing circuit packs to employ the XFP module. Accordingly, what is needed is a module for adapting XFP to a 300 pin MSA transponder socket, enabling a transition from 300 pin MSA to XFP without circuit pack hardware and software redesign.